Google Feed to Take on Facebook’s Newsfeed

Google on Wednesday announced an overhaul of its search app on mobile phones to include a personalized feed of links about hobbies, travel, sports and other topics, a move that puts the search company into more direct competition with social networks such as Facebook.

“We want people to understand they’re consuming information from Google,” Sashi Thakur, a Google engineering vice president, told reporters. “It will just be without a query.”

Google’s feed isn’t a replacement for content from social media, like Facebook’s News Feed. For example, it doesn’t include information that users’ friends are interested in. However, it is a way for people to stay up to date on what matters to them without having to search, and it can surface content users might not have been able to find otherwise.

It’s a revision of Google Now, the company’s foray into predictively providing users with information that they care about. However, unlike the first iteration of Now, the new feed is focused only on providing search content that users care about. (Information about flight statuses, package tracking, and other details is available in a separate feed, also inside the Google search app.)

To help you keep up with exactly what you care about, you’ll now be able to follow topics, right from Search results. Look out for a new “Follow” button next to certain types of search results—including movies, sports teams, your favorite bands or music artists, famous people, and more. A quick tap of the follow button and you’ll start getting updates and stories about that topic in your feed.

Users will be able to unfollow topics to refine what they see and Google details that some topics won’t ever pop up so your frantic searches for the cause of that weird rash won’t result in a new area of interest. Also of note is the way Google will be using the feed to shape how people absorb the news. Instead of just tossing a news article into the feed as a standalone entity, the feed will highlight multiple news sources and fact checks that throw the veracity of information into the forefront of a user’s mind, Techcrunch reported.

The new-and-improved news feed is coming to all US users of the Google app today and will be rolling out globally over the next couple weeks. (Image- Google Blog)

Curious, Keen Observant & Dynamic! Chinmay finds peace in meeting people who work hard for humanity. He has new found interest in Gadgets and Techs and at Techstory he gets to write about it! Reach out at- chinmay@techstory.in